For the past year, 43-year-old Eman Amin has been living with her family in a rented apartment in Zababdeh, a town about 10 miles south of Jenin in the northern West Bank. Like tens of thousands of other Palestinians, she fled her home in the Jenin refugee camp last January, when Israel launched the military operation known officially as "Iron Wall" targeting the Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams refugee camps simultaneously.

Having expelled over 30,000 residents from their homes inside those camps with no indication of when, or if, they will be allowed to return, the ongoing operation constitutes the single largest act of forced displacement in the West Bank since the start of Israel's occupation in 1967.

"We once treated the camp as a temporary station while waiting to return to our village of Zir'in," Amin told +972 Magazine, referring to the Palestinian village north of Jenin that was occupied and destroyed by Zionist forces in 1948. "Now we find ourselves waiting to return to the waiting station itself."

For Amin and many other Palestinians from the northern refugee camps, this uncertainty shapes daily life. "Every day feels like we're stuck in limbo," she added. "Our routines are all messed up, and even the simplest things — going to the market, sending the kids to school — are shadowed by not knowing if we'll ever see our home again."

According to UN estimates, more than 1,460 buildings across Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams camps have been destroyed or sustained severe or moderate damage since the start of the incursion. This includes over 52 percent of buildings in Jenin camp — the hardest hit of the three — signaling a level of destruction that extends beyond isolated targets and amounts to a sweeping assault on the camp's urban fabric.

At the end of December, Israeli bulldozers leveled 25 buildings in the Nur Shams camp, containing around 100 housing units. Local committees submitted urgent petitions to Israel's High Court, arguing that the demolitions were unnecessary and punitive. But the court rejected the petitions, echoing rulings issued in similar cases in Jenin earlier this year and effectively granting legal cover for continued destruction.

"These are not random demolitions," Faisal Salama, head of the Popular Committee in Tulkarem camp, told +972. "They are part of a broader plan to impose a new structural reality inside the camps."

According to the Israeli army, the demolitions were carried out in part to ensure "operational freedom of action" for Israeli forces. And alongside this widespread destruction, the army has begun paving wide roads inside the camps, emphasizing a move toward permanent spatial restructuring.

These roads began to take shape in July, as heavy machinery carved wide access paths through densely built neighborhoods that were previously accessible only on foot. While Israeli authorities have not publicly released plans detailing the scope of the paving, residents and local officials say the routes are significantly wider than existing alleyways and appear designed to allow the unhindered movement of military vehicles.

"Once you open these roads, you change everything," Salama said. "You turn the camp from a protected civilian space into an open terrain for military control. It's not reconstruction — it's erasure."